SPARK SR1000 UWB Wireless Transceiver Family

When Bluetooth was developed in the late 1990’s, nobody could have imagined how far wireless technology would evolve in the following decades. As we enter the 2020’s, legacy wireless protocols are being stretched beyond their limits in an attempt to squeeze out just a bit more battery life or just a bit more bandwidth or shortened latency. But narrowband RF can only be pushed so far: most of these approaches compromise quality and latency. A new approach is necessary.

The SPARK SR1000 UWB IC family takes full advantage of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology to simultaneously deliver industry-leading energy efficiency, latency and bandwidth:

• Data rates of up to 10 Mbps @ 1.5 nJ/bit energy efficiency
• 2 mW power consumption while transmitting and receiving 1 Mbps, scaling to 6 uW at 1 kbps
• Ultra-short wireless latency (50 µs for 1 kb)
• Time-of-flight positioning at 30 cm accuracy

The SPARK SR1000 family consists of two products:

• SR1010: 3.1 – 6 GHz Band
• SR1020: 6 – 9.25 GHz Band

The SDK is an extensive software suite for the SR1000 Series UWB transceivers. It can be used to simplify and accelerate development for applications such as establishing communication links between two transceivers for low latency and low power data exchange.

The SPARK SR1000 Series Evaluation Kit (EVK) demonstrates the capabilities of the SR1000 family of low power, low latency, high data rate radio transceivers through audio streaming, gaming hub functionality, data transfers with predefined patterns, and ranging.
The EVK leverages an ARM-based STM32G4 microcontroller to communicate with the SR1010 or SR1020 transceiver and the provided software application.
The intended purpose of this EVK demo is to show the unique qualities of the SR1000 transceiver family in terms of data rate, power consumption, and latency according to different configurable presets that can be changed using a GUI.

EVK BOARD AND MODULES – HW SOURCE FILES

Headset Demonstrator (Uncompressed Audio)

The SPARK Headset audio solution is a complete hardware/software solution built to provide a reliable, low latency and uncompressed high quality audio link. The solution uses the SR1020 ultra-low latency high data-rate wireless transceiver, a MAXIM MAX98091 low power stereo codec and a ARM Cortex-M4 based STM MCU running SPARK’s proprietary audio and wireless stack. Specifications include:

• Configurable sampling rate: 16 kHz, 48kHz and 96 kHz
• Fixed latency: 10 ms
• Raw uncompressed 16-bit audio (no compression, no masking)
• PC GUI allowing the user to switch from one mode to another

Mouse Reference Design package

The SPARK Mouse Reference Design package is a hardware/software reference design showing how to build a reliable, low power, low latency, high data rate “PC USB Dongle to Mouse” link for high polling rate gaming applications.

This reference design uses the SR1020 ultra-low latency high data-rate wireless transceiver and an ARM Cortex-M33 based MCU running SPARK’s proprietary wireless stack. The FW development environment is supporting both Linux and Windows PCs, it shows how to build both dongle and mouse HW and FW allowing to get a 2000 FPS link with sub-ms latency for high polling rate gaming mouse applications. The HW reference design is showing schematics and layout of both USB dongle and mouse reference designs, with an actual high-end optical gaming navigation sensor with an illumination source, that can support polling rates up to 8KHz and resolutions up to 26,000 cpi.